“I don’t know that they would have done me much good,” replied Hetta.

 

“Good!  Well, they’d do me more good than a long sermon, I know,” said Susan; “except on a Sunday, of course,” she added apologetically.  This was an ill-tempered attack both on Hetta and Hetta’s admirer.  But then why had Hetta been so snappish?

 

“I’m sure he’s a wolf;” thought Hetta as she went to bed.

 

“What a very clever young man he is!” thought Susan to herself as she pulled the warm clothes round about her shoulders and ears.

 

“Well that certainly was an improvement,” thought Aaron as he went through the same operation, with a stronger feeling of self-approbation than he had enjoyed for some time past.

 

In the course of the next fortnight the family arrangements all altered themselves.  Unless when Beckard was there Aaron would sit in the widow’s place, the widow would take Susan’s chair, and the two girls would be opposite.  And then Dunn would read to them; not sermons, but passages from Shakspeare, and Byron, and Longfellow.  “He reads much better than Mr. Beckard,” Susan had said one night.  “Of course you’re a competent judge!” had been Hetta’s retort.  “I mean that I like it better,” said Susan.  “It’s well that all people don’t think alike,” replied Hetta.

 

And then there was a deal of talking.  The widow herself, as unconscious in this respect as her youngest daughter, certainly did find that a little variety was agreeable on those long winter nights; and talked herself with unaccustomed freedom.  And Beckard came there oftener and talked very much.  When he was there the two young men did all the talking, and they pounded each other immensely.  But still there grew up a sort of friendship between them.

 

“Mr. Beckard seems quite to take to him,” said Mrs. Bell to her eldest¹ daughter.

 

“It is his great good nature, mother,” replied Hetta.

 

It was at the end of the second month when Aaron took another step in advance—a perilous² step.  Sometimes on evenings he still went on with his drawing for an hour or so; but during three or four evenings he never asked any one to look at what he was doing.  On one Friday he sat over his work till late, without any reading or talking at all; so late that at last Mrs. Bell said, “If you’re going to sit much longer, Mr. Dunn, I’ll get you to put out the candles.”  Thereby showing, had he known it or had she, that the mother’s confidence in the young man was growing fast.  Hetta knew all about it, and

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